Trusting Reality to Express Christ's Presence

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Friday, February 02, 2007
|
Permalink

 
Thanks to Mick Silva, I read a fascinating interview with novelist Andrew Klavan at World Magazine. Klavan talks to Marvin Olasky about everything from how becoming a Christian has influenced his treatment of evil and human nature in fiction to what the dominance of literary theory in the academy has meant for education. Mick quotes this passage:

Becoming a Christian actually made me less likely to use Christian symbolism and structures in my work because now I see Christ's presence underlying all of life -- I don't have to place Him there artistically. Baptism made me more of a realist, more willing to let each character go his own way and tell his own story as he would. I'm a novelist, remember, not a preacher. I trust reality to express Christ's presence, because I think that's what it actually does.

That, to me, is a perfect statement of what "writing from a Christian worldview" ought to mean. Confidence that reality really does express Christ's presence leads to an unrestrained honesty about the world. I wish this viewpoint were more widely held in evangelical publishing, where "writing from a Christian worldview" does not always exemplify such confidence. Here's another passage I liked:

I think a lot of modern novelists think they're going to explain evil to you, really get to the heart of it. And what you get instead is pathologizing rhetoric, characters forced to behave according to the latest fad psychological theory. The more I trust to God's reality, the more I let evil characters just act the way they do in real life.

As a crime fiction enthusiast, I've run into the same thing. The pathologizing tendency has ruined some otherwise exemplary books. Once again, this shows how reality is preferable to theory -- especially when you say you beleive your theory is reality. Hedging on reality is just another way of signaling to readers that you don't have confidence in your claims.

It's a very good interview, so be sure to check it out. My World subscription seems to have lapsed since my move from Houston, so I re-subscribed just to read the interview online. It was worth it.